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I just watched my copy of The Permaculture Orchard,
and I was extremely impressed. This is a very well put-together film about how
to make a commercial scale orchard (or smaller if you want, the same ideas
apply) using permaculture design principles. The presentation was great, and it
clearly comes ...

Here we are (finally) at the next part of our software tutorial. Contours - the
one thing that caused the most trouble and anxiety for the last class. The good
news is that it's pretty easy for most of us! There's a lot of free data out
there for ...

We have what seems like an impossible task ahead of us: How are we going to
move the mountain of culture? I want my kids to live in a world where people
spend more time with friends than devices, where everyone has the chance to
really master something, and where ...

Okay, we're off to a good start. If you followed the challenge from last week,
you should now have a good set of software tools to work with. Now it's time to
give a couple of them a workout. Here's what we're going to do:
1 ...

Okay, here we are at the first week of the course. Last year, many students were
very stressed out by the final project, and in particular about how to get the
software working while at the same time trying to do a design and get it put up
on the ...

Review Questions

These are some quick questions to bring back some of the important concepts from
the videos, and to get you warmed up for the discussion questions that follow. I
tried to pick the stuff that will be most important for later in the course, to
help solidify the ...

I took Geoff Lawton's first online PDC and was deeply impressed by the content
and the effort he put into creating it. I think he's probably doing more than
any other human being on Earth to make the world better for the future, so it
was with great ...

Permaculture is a big part of civilization's future. It's also a very complex
topic, and could easily consume lifetimes of study. Permaculture design touches
ecology, physics, biology, complex adaptive systems, and a dozen other fields.
Fortunately, it obeys the Pareto principle, so you can do a pretty good ...

Ecology is a complex and fascinating science. There is a lifetime of stuff to learn about even a simple functional ecosystem. Even if there's only one way for a pair of elements in a system to interact with each other, the number of interactions grows as the square of ...

We are constantly surrounded by a sea of influence. All six of Cialdini's
weapons of influence [1] are at work, shaping our behavior, all the
time. This is a natural and vital part of being in a society with other people,
even if it seems like some kind of ...

At first glance, things aren't going too well around here. Depending on who you
ask, our civilization will end soon from either climate change, energy
shortages, fresh water shortages, drug-resistant microbes, electromagnetic
pulses, or any of a host of other apocalyptic visions. They may be right, I
don't ...